In today's competitive, dynamic, and fluctuating business environment, new on-demand technologies are required to reduce total cost of ownership, improve the return on IT investments, and support company growth. In this regard, system and data utilization rates are relatively low in data centers. These under-utilized IT assets need to be properly tapped to respond to variable workload demands.
Servers are an integral part of any data center and their utilization is generally critical to the efficient operation of the data center. However, in conventional data centers, servers are often underutilized. Further, server-to-administrator ratios are low and there is a requirement for automatic rapid and consistent deployment of the servers. Conventional technologies deployed to automate data centers generally rely on preexisting hardware and are prone to incorrectly discovering new connections arising because of the addition of new servers.
Currently, installation and management of servers in data centers involves a number of complicated tasks. In particular, adding a new server to an automated data center requires determining and loading server-specific attributes and fabric information into the database of the automated data center. Server-specific attribute information includes IP addresses, hostnames, MAC addresses, model numbers, serial numbers, architecture, and the like. Fabric-specific information includes data related to the physical connections between the server and the associated storage and network devices within the automated data center. Conventional techniques for adding a server require manually identifying and loading such information into the database of the data center. Manual identification and entry of server-specific attributes and fabric information can be very time consuming and is prone to data entry errors.